Scientist Profile: Michael Twardowski

An unwritten rule of this cruise seems to be that every project and instrument must have a cool acronym. Michael Trawdowski follows this rule, throwing around acronyms like AOP and MASCOT. Trawdowski is aboard from New Jersey, representing Wet Labs, an Oregon-based company that builds innovative machinery to study water. As a man who never wanted to be stuck in a lab, Trawdowski loves his job because it allows him to apply his post-doctorate in the field, hands-on. He says with almost giddy excitement, “You’re the only one who has [the new instrumentation], you’re seeing something that no one’s ever seen before… The results that you’ve collected are going to be brand new and really novel.”

Trawdowski has brought with him the MASCOT, or Multi Angle Scattering and Optical Transmission, which resembles a black box frame equipped with scientific contraptions. The MASCOT is a powerful tool, a year and a half in the making, that measures light scattering from seventeen angles, the light sources arranged into a semicircle and coming to focus at one point. Using light beams, the MASCOT measures inherent optic properties (IOP), or optic properties of the water itself, rather than apparent optic properties (AOP), which depend on ambient light from the sun. Trawdowski and his team know the exact properties of their light source, such as wave length and frequency, eliminating the complex unknowns of the sun’s light. Using the MASCOT, Trawdowski’s team will be able to model the light three dimensionally.

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